Project management is not for people who like to improvise. Several sophisticated methods for managing projects have been developed through decades of thought and practice by professional project managers. You can benefit from this collected wisdom by surveying the various methods to find the style that suits your business and your project. Once you develop your project management repertoire, you can adapt to any task and effectively manage the team working on a project.

Waterfall Method

The waterfall method is a linear approach. First the project manager determines the requirements for the project, and then a project developer designs the project, project members build the project by putting all the pieces in order and the manager then integrates the project into the business for testing and debugging. Once the project is ready, management implements the project and a manager is assigned to maintain it.

Agile Approach

The agile approach does away with the idea of developing a project in sequential pieces. Instead, the project team presents a version of the project that is complete enough to potentially implement. Team members attend "scrum" meetings where they evaluate the latest version of the project and make suggestions for improvement. The project developers then create a second version with the suggested changes and present it. This process can continue through four or more versions until the scrum process has addressed all the requirements. In short, the agile method presents full project versions that can be tweaked.

Six Sigma

The Six Sigma method works well for projects that you can precisely measure. The idea is to look for any deviations from absolute perfection and address the causes of those deviations. To do this, you define, measure, analyze, improve and control the project throughout its development and implementation so you achieve exactly the results you want with little variation. For example, a project to build a software system that detects nonbusiness uses of employee computers could benefit from the Six Sigma approach. Absolute perfection would be detecting each personal use of business computers. You would test and refine the system so there are no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. This is a Six Sigma standard.

Kanban Technique

With kanban, project managers use a white board with stickie notes placed in one of three columns: "in queue," "in progress" and "recently completed." The notes contain descriptions of project tasks. The team can easily see what tasks are coming up, which ones are being worked on and which are finished. If someone brings in a new task, the project manager can see where it belongs on the kanban board and how it affects the other tasks. For example, a new task with great urgency might cause a task that is already in progress to be put on hold by being moved back to the "in queue" column.

About the Author

Kevin Johnston writes for Ameriprise Financial, the Rutgers University MBA Program and Evan Carmichael. He has written about business, marketing, finance, sales and investing for publications such as "The New York Daily News," "Business Age" and "Nation's Business." He is an instructional designer with credits for companies such as ADP, Standard and Poor's and Bank of America.